The Death of Magic
by aces
Summary: Can you really say good-bye to magic?


*peeks in through back door and looks around* Hello? *waves sheepishly, grins* Long time no see, yeah? I kinda wandered away from I-Man fandom for a while there...but I'm back now! And I come bearing gifts in the form of fanfic! :-D Anyway, I know it's been done before, and it's been done better, but I was reliving the joy that is "Ralph" again the other day...and I just had to write this. Hope you enjoy.  
  
Usual disclaimers: don't own characters, make no profit off story, write only for the entertainment of myself and others. Anyone who says otherwise is lying and I'll have them shot. Just kidding. *wink*  
  
THE DEATH OF MAGIC (Of Monsters and Invisible Friends)  
  
"To her I was magic. How do you say good-bye to that?" ~ Darien Fawkes  
  
***  
  
She stood in the midst of the throng surrounding the paintings, grinning partly in pride and partly in embarassment as she received the sincere compliments on her work. She did her best to receive the compliments gracefully, with proper dignity. Her mother stood nearby, grinning solely with pride.  
  
She was tall, and young, very young, dressed in an ankle-length dress, her long blonde hair loose, attempting--and suceeding--to look older. She was one of a handful of young local artists with exceptional talent being showcased in the park this weekend. There would be a ceremony later, with speeches from prominent local artistic and political figures, and the handing out of scholarships. It all felt a little unreal to her. She was only fifteen.  
  
And still the people wandered among the artwork in admiration. The other teens had worked with sculpture, with clay and pottery, with charcoal; she was the only one who had concentrated on oils and water colours. A variety of subjects were presented in her paintings--a brilliant sunset on the ocean, a mountainside covered in greenery, a cityscape, the interior of a child's bedroom. The atmosphere of each painting was different and pervasive, immediately felt. The artist knew her subjects well.  
  
And so she stood in the middle of the praise and her work, a slight blush tinging her cheeks and a slight, shy smile curving her lips, and her attention was caught by a particular admirer, standing in front of a view of greenery and rocks, inspired by a certain favored spot in the park near her home that she'd rediscovered only a few months ago after avoiding for a few years in deference to a good-bye she had made there.  
  
He slouched, his hands stuffed into his jeans pockets, casual in a black leather jacket, one of the park-goers who had been attracted by the crowds rather than one of the well-dressed patrons who would probably be giving the speeches and handing out the scholarships in a half-hour or so. He was tall, too, much taller than she, with dark spiky hair.  
  
The colour drained from her cheeks, the smile trembled before fully dissolving away from her lips. "Ralph?" she whispered, and she was eight years old again and saying good-bye to her best friend, all thoughts of fifteen-year-old dignity fleeing her mind.  
  
But here he was, standing in front of the picture of his home, and it was an impossibility, because Ralph had been a figment of her imagination. Even if she'd often wondered how her eight-year-old imagination had suddenly been able to conjure up an image of a handsome young man with no experience on which to base that image, during that incomprehensible mess with the monster. The man who had been a monster.  
  
It didn't matter. He was apparently real, and he was here. Perhaps she was still the only one who could see him; perhaps he'd come back especially, just to see her. "Ralph," she called and slipped her way through the crowd with difficulty. "Ralph!" she yelled again and felt like she was calling across time, trying to conjure up her childhood before she'd even fully left it.  
  
He at last looked away from the representation of his home and looked around for the next painting to view, a slight smile on his lips and an odd, almost melancholy expression in his eyes. She remembered those wide brown eyes, remembered the working of his face as she told him good-bye, and her heart clenched and leaped into her throat so that she couldn't call out to him again and attract his attention. She couldn't believe she'd told him good-bye, couldn't believe she'd hurt him that way. She kept pushing through the crowd.  
  
And he looked up in curiosity at the commotion heading his way, and his eyes locked onto hers, and he froze, brown eyes wide and caught. "Oh crap," she heard him say distinctly, and then he turned and strode away quickly.  
  
She stopped, watching him almost run way, desolated by the rejection. But she remembered the last time he had avoided her, monstrous madness blazing in his eyes, and she remembered that he had come back to her then. And she hoped he would come back again.  
  
***  
  
"Ms Semplar?" he asked, a nervousness evident in the polite breathless catch of his tone, in the honesty of his wide brown eyes, making him seem boyish and eager when he should have been mature and suave.  
  
"Yes?" she replied, standing in the doorway and regarding him in dubious confusion. He was slouching on her doorstep in khakis and t-shirt, hands stuffed into his pockets. He didn't look like anyone official.  
  
"May I see your daughter Jessica please?"  
  
Instantly, suspicion crossed her face. "May I ask why?" she answered, fully preparing to slam the door in his face.  
  
"Mom," she said quietly behind her mother from where she'd stopped in the living room to see what was going on, "it's okay."  
  
Her mother turned around. "You know this man?"  
  
She regarded him, and he looked back at her from the doorstep with an almost uncomfortable intensity. "Yeah," she said and repeated, "it's okay."  
  
Her mother didn't look entirely certain, but she opened the door further and allowed him to enter the house.  
  
"Come on," she said, holding out her hand. He looked down at it in suprise, then pulled his right hand out of his pocket and with the barest confused hesitation took hers. She led him to her room, her mother's disapproving and worried frown hovering over them as they left.  
  
She shut the door firmly behind her and hoped her mother would understand, no matter what explanation she had to come up with later. Her mother had always been a little overprotective since that...incident...seven years ago.  
  
"Ralph," she said, looking at him again from her place by the door.  
  
He was staring at the watercolour she had sitting on an easel, waiting for its finishing touches. It was of him, turned a quarter away from facing front, hands stuffed in jeans pockets and wearing a black leather jacket. She'd captured the new, fine lines on his face around mouth and eyes; she'd captured the smoothing over of certain angers, certain bitternesses, in his air. And she'd done it with just the slightest glimpse she'd had of him yesterday.  
  
She didn't tell him that one of her favorite doodles in class was drawing his face in the margins of her notebooks when taking breaks from notes.  
  
"Wow," he said softly and turned to her. "You...you're really good, Jessica." He offered her a tentative smile, which failed to go with the honest sincerity in his compliment.  
  
She nodded and tried to keep her expression neutral, tried to stop her face from working, but she was only fifteen, and she was feeling decidedly eight at the moment. "Why'd you come back?" she asked in a small voice.  
  
A wry, difficult expression crossed his face. "I never really left," he said, then paused and sighed. "I'm sorry, Jess. I saw your picture and the article in the paper, saw that you were still painting and getting recognition for it, and...and suddenly I wanted to see--how you were getting on." He had puppy dog eyes, and the intense recollection the sight brought of the last time she'd seen that expression in his brown eyes was overwhelming. "You're a lot taller," he added obscurely. He sounded wistful.  
  
"I'm catching up with you," she informed him with a tremulous smile, and then frowned, as his words sunk into her shell-shocked mind. "Paper? You read...who *are* you?"  
  
He'd stuffed his hand back into his pocket the instant he'd entered the room; he was contatining himself, holding himself separately from her, not quite stepping back into her world. He was ephemeral, a trick of the light, about to fade away again. He looked distinctly uncomfortable, and the thought crossed her mind that he really ought to be acting older than her.  
  
"I work...for the goverment," he explained softly, gently. "When you got invovled with that sniper business a few years ago, my Agency sent me to...work with you."  
  
She crossed the room to sit down on her bed. It was either that or just slide to the floor, and she did have some pride still. "So you..." She couldn't get her head around it. He was real, and he worked for the government. "You..." He was real, and not her invisible best friend. Focus on something else, please. "How did you...?" She waved a hand vaguely.  
  
"Uh, that's classified," he said awkwardly, turning to face her without coming any closer. "Sorry, Jess. I can't tell you how I...yeah." He waved his own hand in imitation of her gesture.  
  
She blew out a breath, a stark look of incomprehension in her green eyes. She was casual today, not so adult-looking as yesterday at the function, dressed in jeans and with her hair pulled back into a ponytail. But she was still, would always be, the kid to him. He waited uncomfortably, looking around and taking in the changes to her room that had happened in the past seven years. He wondered if she still had the Hungry Hippos game in her closet somewhere.  
  
She looked up at him, her eyes wide and confused. His attention was arrested by the look, and he winced. He hadn't meant for her to see him yesterday; he'd only come to see how she was getting on. He hadn't meant to run away from her yesterday, but it had been instinctive. He should have just been invisible the whole time he was there. He'd realized afterward he couldn't leave her hanging like that, with a glimpse of a magical ghost. And now he was scared he was forcing her to say good-bye to the magic. For real this time. For good.  
  
He sat down next to her on the bed, taking his hands out of his pockets but leaving them awkwardly in his lap, by his sides. "I'm sorry, Jess," he said.  
  
She shook her head slowly in confusion. He wasn't sure she'd even heard him. "You're not real," she said. "I mean, Ralph's not real. *You* are. And you're not him."  
  
He nodded. She'd summed it up succinctly. And he felt perversely like a murderer. No, he couldn't let that happen. "No," he said, "no, Ralph *is* real. Okay, Jess? He *is* real. And I'd like to thank you for introducing him to me."  
  
She looked up at him, a patented look of contemputious teenage 'what*ever*' disbelief on her face, and he felt chastened, but he wasn't going to give up. "Okay, so that was crap, but seriously, Jessica. If I hadn't met you, and if you hadn't thought of me as your invisible best friend...I don't know where either of us would be today."  
  
He paused. "Reality's as real as we want it to be, ya know?" he went on after thinking it through carefully. "So...Ralph was real. Is real. Does that make sense?"  
  
She thought about it, thought about her paintings as representations of the realities she saw around her, thought about how monsters could become men and men could transform into monsters, and she thought about the safety of a hug given in a hospital room and the wrenching of a hug given in a park by an invisible best friend's home.  
  
She glanced across at him and smiled a little. "Maybe you are Ralph after all," she said.  
  
He grinned back, still looking entirely too young to be an adult, and that was exactly how she remembered Ralph. He'd looked like an adult, but she'd accepted him as a kid with her.  
  
"Look, Jess..." he started. "Technically, I really shouldn't be here at all. If Hobbe found out about this, he'd practically have my hide. He'd at least give me a lecture about the importance of maintaining secrecy. So, uh...I should probably get going."  
  
Oh. So it was his turn to do the leaving this time. She nodded and stood up, leading him back to the front door. She could see a strange car in the driveway. Odd to think of Ralph driving. She didn't even have her permit yet. She turned back to him. "Okay," she said, steadying herself mentally. She'd have time to think about all of this later, after he was gone again. "Okay. You can go now, Ralph."  
  
He nodded, eyebrows working, and then he impulsively reached forward to hug her. She returned the hug quickly and with an intensity that surprised even her. And this time he didn't have to fall to his knees to hold her.  
  
After a long moment, they released each other, and he hesitantly pulled something out of his trouser pocket. "Uh...I was wondering if you wanted this back..."  
  
A smile blossomed on her face suddenly when she saw the little golden key, just a little tarnished after all these years. She took it, held it to remember its contours, and then handed it back to him. "I couldn't," she said, looking up at him shyly. "It'd mean taking away your freedom again. But thanks."  
  
He grinned again, lop-sidedly, and laid a hand on her shoulder for a moment, stuffing the key back into his pocket. And then he was gone, jumping into his car and pulling out of the driveway. He waved as he revved off down the road. She waved back.  
  
"Who was that, sweetie?" her mother asked, coming back into the living room and trying to smooth away the worried frown from her face before her daughter saw it.  
  
Jessica Semplar leaned against the doorframe, still watching the road where his car had disappeared. "An old friend," she said.  
  
"Old friend?" Her mother sounded lost.  
  
She grinned suddenly at her mother, heading back to her room. She wanted to finish up the painting, while the details of him were still fresh in her mind. "Yeah," she said. "One of the best friends I've had. He just wanted to check up on me."  
  
She laughed at the confusion still evident on her mother's face and almost skipped back to her room.  
  
***  
  
"Magick is a wondrous thing. Never dead or gone. Nothing stays real. But magick shall live on." ~ Leah Davis 


End file.
